RIP Baby Beluga

This touched my heart, my daughter and I used to sing the song when she was just a little girl. She loved it, and this sure brought back another memory.

I am the sensitive sort, and this make me get teary eyes, well it’s better to be honest, isn’t it? I feel things deeply and it’s just how I am.

Baby Beluga

Kavna, the beluga whale that inspired the beloved children’s song “Baby Beluga” by singer Raffi, died at the Vancouver Aquarium on Monday. The whale was in good health until early last weekend, when her keepers first suspected she was unwell. A necropsy showed cancerous lesions.

Kavna’s keepers believe she was around 46 years old, if not older, making her one of the oldest beluga whales in captivity. Belugas in the wild usually live to between 25 and 30 years.

“It was very sudden, it was very acute, and happened so quickly,” said Clint Wright, Vancouver Aquarium’s general manager, at a press conference. “We were all hoping that she was come through this. She’s been so robust for so long, we believed she was was impervious to everything. It was a great shock to everybody.”

The beluga was known around the world for inspiring “Baby Beluga,” a children’s song about an imaginary whale by singer Raffi Cavoukian.

“She had a profound impact on me when I met her in 1979,” Cavoukian told Canadian radio station, News 1130. “The folks at the [Vancouver] Aquarium brought me to poolside and the trainer helped me to play with Kavna. Kavna even came out of the water and placed a gentle, graceful kiss on my cheek and I couldn’t stop talking about it for a couple of weeks!”